Trust in Him
Chapter 10: You Don't Know What Guilt Is
Previously:
"OPEN THIS FUCKING THING!" Albert cried from the other side. He had managed to climb up the ladder, but was too late. The glass wall above him had already latched itself to the wall. He was too late. There was nothing he could do to move it. The water level was up to his chest and he had nowhere else to go. He would inevitably drown.
He continued to smash his fist against the unflinching glass, but the three didn't do anything aside from watching him squirm.
"Let's go." Brian said. He lifted Teresa's only good arm and put it around the back of his neck, putting him a few centimeters from Teresa's pale cheeks. He was acting as her support in the case her legs suddenly give out on her. "We need to get you to a hospital." He told her.
"Funny," Sam muttered, doing the same as Brian, putting her neck underneath Teresa's armpit and helped her stand up with Brian. "I thought we were in one."
The irony had caught on with Teresa and she managed a short chuckle. The three trotted out of the room as the timer behind them displayed the remaining 10 minutes they have.
Teresa kept on groaning in pain, blood had nearly stopped leaking from the eviscerated limb. They had just escaped death once again, this time at the expense of Albert. He almost survived along with them, but his greed and impatience cost him in the end. Now he was drowning, or drowned, in a room full of water that almost became Teresa's final resting place.
Brian and Sam, both supporting Teresa, who felt nauseated by the sight of her arm, intense pain and great shock from her recent brush with death. Blood continued to drip from where her hand used to be, leaving behind a trail from the previous room and into the hallway they were walking through. With every hurried step the two would uncoordinatedly make, a tinge of pain would shoot up from her arm, and with every tinge of pain she would let out a squeak. She tried to suppress the pain and she was failing.
When they turned the corner, they saw a dark, open room in front of them.
"Wait." Teresa muttered hoarsely. Brian and Sam stopped in their tracks upon hearing Teresa's words. "Put me down."
"We don't have time to stop. We only have 10 minutes until our collars detonate." Sam said, remembering the timer she saw in the previous room.
Brian himself was trying to catch his breath. The adrenaline and the surge of energy he felt during the previous trap were nearly out of his system and he was now almost drained. Even Sam felt tired, but fought through the exhaustion. Now wasn't the time for them to sit and recover, they can recover all they want after they survive this whole ordeal. After a while, Brian straightened up and approached Teresa. "You okay to move?" he asked.
Teresa wanted to say no, wanted to give up and just bleed to death. Her arm was numb with pain; her head felt like it had been spun too many times on a fast moving carousel and her body wanted to ignore her completely. All of this she would be willing to do, but she didn't want to disappoint Brian. She had managed to rescue him from a slow death and she knew he was willing to return the favor. She would do anything to show to him that she cares, and right now she didn't want to disappoint him.
"Y-Yeah." She tried to move and it made her voice break. She bit her lip to hold back the pain. Once she thought she could manage it, she exhaled and took Brian's extended hand. He pulled her to her feet and held her steady while Sam moved ahead.
Once she crossed the doorway, the room that was once swallowed by the darkness was filled with bright white lights. It revealed what looked like a bathroom, or what was once a bathroom. The room was filled with gray tiles with muck filled sides; some were even uneven and unattached to the wall and floor. The metal curtain holders were currently nonexistent so big empty holes filled the walls. It was an overall mess.
These were considered normal compared to the things that stood out in the room. Four chains hung from the roof, the distance between each chain was the length of two arms. At the end of each chain was a metal handle decorated with barbwire and broken glass that could be seen from a distance. Set against the wall facing Sam was a small cubicle of fogged up glass with a frame of metal and rust. The entire cubicle was tall, twice the height of an average person, making it impossible to climb over. Inside were a shower and a small shelf. Right beside the cubicle on the wall was a container wrapped in a red blanket. Above it was a set of small unlit bulbs and the timer that was counting down of what remained. A tape recorder stood on the shelf inside the cubicle and smeared on the wall behind it with what appears to be red paint was Sam's name.
"So this is my trap." Sam muttered to herself as she slowly approached it. Brian and Teresa slowly followed her inside both wondering how the trap would function. They found out what its first function was when the door swung itself shut sealing Sam inside. She turned and tried banging against the door, but after all she has gone through tonight she learned that if it was your time to be tested you won't be able to fight against it. Across her at an arm's reach was the tape containing whatever instruction or threat she has to listen to.
"Hey! Are you alright in there!" Brian called when he saw the door close and heard her briefly panic.
"I'm fine." Sam replied. Not for long. She thought. She took the tape into her hands and saw the tape inside ready to be played. After pressing the play button, the voice in it began to talk.
"Hello Samantha. Do you know how corrupt the government and its representatives are? You should know because you are one." The voice said. Sam wasn't surprised anymore, but she was more anxious of what the tape would say next. "You should ask Brian too. He has seen you at work."
Brian put Teresa down as soon he heard that last sentence and immediately charged for the cubicle. He knew it won't open, but he just remembered something and he wanted to make sure that it was the right memory. "Samantha Weiss? That's your name, isn't it!"
Samantha froze against the foggy glass wall. She hadn't realized that she paused the recording in order to hear the man on the other side. Her identity has been revealed. She knew it was inevitable, but she hoped that it would happen after the tests. Now she had nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. "So you do remember me."
"I do now."
"And here I thought you've forgotten all about me when we were in the first room." She said. A chuckle followed it in order to hide her anxiety. "I wouldn't blame you, though. I'd rather not remember what I did."
A groan came from behind and it momentarily took Brian's attention from the girl in the cubicle. Teresa looked up, her face pale and tired looking. "What is she talking about?"
"A year ago when I was still a lawyer, there was a case against a member of an organization that was dealing in human trafficking." Brian recalled. With the recent reminder, he was able to easily remember the event. He must've forgotten it while he was still trying to recover from the trauma that was losing his wife. "I was called up to defend him. Guess who the prosecutor was."
He looked at Teresa and was able to see how she reacted. She wanted to say "How is that bad?" but wasn't able to speak. She felt weak and she needed to save her strength. Brian then went on and told her how they met.
Initially, I wouldn't have done the job, but apparently nobody wanted to be connected to case even if they would get paid a lot more. I didn't have a choice. So, after my client and I made the decision on the plea bargain, we were pulled aside by a few men. They were associates of my client, sent by the higher ups of the organization. I thought they just for protection in case some renegade human rights vigilante. They were actually there to fetch someone.
"Brian Michaelson!" a voice from across the hall said. I had to look around the henchmen to see the prosecutor, Samantha Weiss, calling my attention. She waved me over and gestured me to take a seat beside her. I didn't know why she was taking this time to converse with me when she could have been making a case against my client. Though, I did find out soon after. "Quite a case you have there."
"Yeah. Tough luck for me." I replied. "I'm not gonna like my wife's reaction to this."
"Don't worry about it. I'm sure she'll understand." She had a sly smile on her face as she said this. "I just wanted to check on your client if he's feeling antsy or anything."
This got me to raise an eyebrow. She was concerned about the guy she planned on putting behind bars. He didn't look like a psycho or someone who would commit suicide to escape prison. He, in fact, looked calm. Too calm. "He doesn't look panicked to me."
"That's because he doesn't need to."
"Are you going somewhere with this. Are you trying to somehow sabotage my case?" I asked. That sly smile on her didn't falter. It just got bigger.
"On the contrary, I'm planning on sabotaging mine." This took me on a loop, confused me to no end. I looked at my client and he was grinning. He even winked at my direction. I looked at Sam and she winked back to my client.
"What?" I said. It was obvious I hadn't caught on with whatever sinister plan she had cooking. "What are you talking about?"
"You are going to win this case. Your client will be free with all charges dropped in a matter of days and he'll come back to his employers squeaky clean." She replied. "I'm not making any case against him. I'll undermine my own so he'll get free. I have the judge under my payroll just in case."
She was still making no sense to me. Samantha Weiss was supposed to be this guardian angel of the law, this role model of the masses. Here she was, telling me that she was making all sorts of plans to have this one guy escape of whatever crime he was guilty of. "Why?"
"He works for me of course. I don't want MY organization to fall apart." That was her motive. She was the leader, the mastermind behind the criminal group.
Teresa's eyes widened upon hearing this unknown secret. She had been helping the head of a criminal organization that specialized on illegal human trafficking and she herself has been aiding her in surviving. If she would have known this sooner then she would have abandoned her early on, letting her sins catch up to her.
"After that, I refused to cooperate with her. I wanted to blow the whistle, tell everyone that she's a fraud. Her men demonstrated her grip on the city by destroying my car right in front of me, in a parking lot, in the middle of the night." Brian continued. "They told me that the same would happen to my family. I didn't want to endanger my kid and my wife."
Brian saw how Teresa reacted after telling this little memory about the corrupted lawyer in the cubicle. He placed a hand on her shoulder, yet there was a grim look on his face. "I know. She fooled me. She fooled everyone for years."
There was a slight chuckle coming from the cubicle. It may have conveyed light heartedness in a nightmare, but Sam felt the irony of her situation. All those years she had been taking children from all sorts of countries, trapping them and locking them away from their families so they could be sold. Now all her wrongdoings in the past had caught up, ready to exact punishment on her. "Fooling everyone that you were this knight in shining armor, pretending to be this nice guy was easy. Living with the guilt was the hard part."
"Guilt?" Brian turned his head to Teresa, who spoke this line with difficulty, but managed to say it. "A person like you wouldn't even know what guilt is."
Silence hung over the air for a moment, the one in the cubicle not knowing how to answer. Brian stood up and once again walked over to the trapped girl and said, "Play the tape." A second later, the tape continued relaying its instructions.
"From your own perspective, you are the saving grace that brings hope to their beloved city, but in my eyes you are a criminal. You are rotten to the core. You have made deals with various people, used your power in the legal system to ensure that your little secret with children will be kept hidden. Today, you shall be cleansed of your sins." As if on cue, the part of the wall covered with the red blanket was pulled and it revealed a container that carried a kilogram of an unlabeled liquid. "The shower above you will spout hydrochloric acid at random intervals and amounts that is until the handles are pulled down for a certain amount of time, unlocking the cubicle. Be careful though for the handles will tear apart the skin on their hands. The door to the next room will not unlock until two minutes have passed. Death or respite, are you will willing to entrust your life onto others? Trust is the key." The timer changed to two minutes and began counting down. A mechanism was activated and the acid started to go down into the pipe t was connected with. A few seconds later, the acid has successfully made its way to the end of the shower.